If there are only 1 million space marines (maybe more because some chapters don't obey the rules), how are they at all a relevant faction in 40k? There are quadrillions of orks.
Unless a chapter of space marines can single handedly take down 1 billion orks, I don't see how they are useful to the imperium. Even if each space marine could take 100 orks, an invasion of 1 million orks could easy take 1000 space marines.
Pretty much the same way batman is relevant in a city of tens of millions.
40k or warhammer stopps working...if you try to apply logic to it.
The numbers never add up.
This.
Or, to put it another way: by being the focus of a senseless story that doesn't care about cohesion or consistency, where the story exists solely to serve the visual entertainment.
>Unless a chapter of space marines can single handedly take down 1 billion orks, I don't see how they are useful to the imperium.
Yeah they can.
>If there are only 1 million space marines (maybe more because some chapters don't obey the rules), how are they at all a relevant faction in 40k? There are quadrillions of orks.
When two armies in 40k fight, they have to be of roughly equal point value.
I like to think that everyone instinctively realizes this and makes the conscious decision to hang back when their presence in combat would overvalue their side.
Marines hold strategic positions and strike at vulnerable spots, nukes from orbit handle the rest. They don't put those bombardment cannons on Marine ships for nothing, user.
the setting is not remotely realistic, but not for this reason. the right people in the right place can make a big difference. space marines are dropped in from space to attack high-value targets, not just to mow down endless waves of orks. likewise, batman isn't there to catch every mugger in the city, he's usually after the people who matter.
its more of a point of application thing, sure there's only 1 million or so SM but, 1. they almost never fight by themselves (mostly acting as shocktroops/ commandos for imperial forces, while the guard tries to hold a line) and 2. when you have a kill/loss ratio in the millions to 1 then yes they could hold off 1 billion orks (though the world would be turned to shit since they can't defend the entire planet at once). SM are the special ops of the Imperium not the rank and file.
I like to think that a player army of say, 100 orks, is just the boss' personal force and there are uncounted thousands of orks, imperial guardsmen and tyranids fighting just off the table. These off-table forces don't have any elite units and are lacking in all other categories except troops.
I think that's the idea, your skirmish game represents the critical moment in the battle. It's looking at a larger battle through a microscope... Unless of course you decide that what's on the table is literally all there is.
>your skirmish game represents the critical moment in the battle. It's looking at a larger battle through a microscope
That's a cool idea
The battle for planet sdfkbhskjdgh will be decided by 400 conscripts and a commisar or 5 and not a single man more!
Well those 400 conscripts and single commissar took part in killing the infamous Warboss Stumpykilla, the loss of whose influence caused the horde to collapse allowing for the sdfkbhskjdgh 56th and 57th to break though and encircle the WAAAAGH! saving the day!
>giving b8 a (you)
C'mon man.
you have an overactive bait detector, my man.
i legit don't get it. im too out of the lingo now. I'm not even the guy you are replying to
what the heck do you mean by
>igving b8 a(you)
b8 = bait (a reply that's obtuse, retarded, or provocative to get attention)
(you) = You'll notice my reply will say (you) because I'm replying to (you)
Keep up old man.
Think of it like the battle for the Hill on the Volga during stalingrad. A couple hundred but if it went the other way the entire million large 6th army would survive versus fall. If they had won they would have encircled and cut down the fleeing Soviets like at Kiev where they lost 3 million. Or something like the rangers scaling the cliffs at Normandy.
Or for more modern stuff, the US forces that took the Kabul airfield. Only one hundred guys but they enabled aircraft and reinforcements right into the enemy capital. Hugely pivotal event and lopsided war. Space marines would be used the same way. Landing to knock out the enemy command and control bunkers, disabling air defense, killing leadership. Look at Iraq 2 for an example of a leader less army. They collapsed.
>What is humour
If 10% of the galaxy's Orks united and took a piss on a chapter of space marines, all the space marines would drown.
40k has no sense of scale, news at 10
Can't space marines breathe underwater?
I would argue they are only useful in small numbers. You should only use them i n boarding actions, deathwatch, or special forces actions. Using them elsewhere is a waste of resources.
This is why I just make chapter 1 million marines in my head
How is that difficult to imagine in 40k?
Those 400 conscripts, pushed by a commissar and enraged by the losses of their families, pushed deep in the tyrannid swarm, encountered the tyrannid prince and his gards, and took it down, sending the rest of the swarm scattered accros
I imagine the space marines being more of a propaganda tool than an actual fighting force on the galactic scale. A bit like the super heavy french tanks in WW2.
I don't think piss is oxygenated in the same way water is.
The Great Crusade had 2 million and something marines and they almost conquered the Galaxy in a couple of centuries. Yes I know there were also regular soldiers, but there is also IG in 40k.
I think GW described the assault phase between two formations in Epic as basically what happens in your average game of 40k.
I once tried to do this over a weekend where we'd play a game of Epic and when ever we did an assault, we played a game of Warhammer 40k. Didn't finish it but it was fun.
I agree, many times in lore when you see space marines Gathered in force they take way heavier casualties than a force as small and resource demanding as they are should be. All the other factions have weapons that shit all over space marine armor. Seems like a huge waste when your centuries old veneteran with priceless gear gets obliterated by a spore mine that took the tyranids a few minutes to pump out, or when they can be matched in combat by something the Nids grew in a day
They also had the benefit of more widely available technology, way more mechanicus support and competent leadership. Most importantly, they could replace the losses taken by the space marines way faster than at current. Most of the legions had times where tens of thousands of legionaries were wiped out and they still managed to replace those losses for the most part
Yes it is. Piss is just water with toxines and non wanted sustances in it.
Not when it's in your bladder. You'd have to let it sit for a bit for oxygen to dissolve into it from the air.
There are several factor that makes 1 million sm useful at galactic scale but are ignored in the game:
The figurine count of armies are not at the same scale. An old white dwarf clarified that when you deploy armies in the game, they are representations of force, especially for infantry not actual numbers: that is, if sm army was 1:1, an ork army would be 1:10 or 1:100, as in most of the models would represent a fair amount of combatants.
As sm is the default faction, all has been upscaled towards that power level, when they should not. According to most of the lore from 2nd and 3rd edition (when wh40k was consolidated) a sm should be able to murder barehanded thousands of orks if wearing his armor. A 2nd ed tactical 10man squad was like 300 before counting sarge's weapons, heavy or special.
The sm are supossed to act as somekind of special force, they would no fight sieges or attrition battles. They droppod/teleport assault the strategic points or leadership, behading the snakes.
They can be used to turn a rebel planet into a compliant one (unless chaos taint is widespread) with minimum bloodshed: bust the rebel liders publicly, show holos of the assault/murderfest, get population shitscared to death and fearful of the god emperor.
My headcannon is that the 1k marines per chapter rule only applies to active marines. This allows for much bigger chapters and thus, far more than a million marines.
Well if your ships containing millions of troops can be eliminated by a handful of this guys then i say a million of them is worth something.
In canon, most chapters do have more than 1000 men. That's because support marines (drivers, pilots, techmarines, chaplains, etc.) don't count towards the limit. The limit is also removed when a Chapter is on a crusade, which is a loophole that some have exploited. That's not even counting the chapter's normal human serfs that crew battleships, maintain the fortress-monastery and so on, which absolutely number into the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Basically, it's almost always more than 1000.
>limit is also removed when a Chapter is on a crusade
Source?
It's 1000 fighting marines. 10 companies of 10 squads of 10 marines. Support staff is its own thing and of course doesn't count into it, because for the most part an apothecary or a librarian is not in the field fighting. You also have to remember that due to losses and such, chapters very rarely have the 1000 fighting marines at any one time.
How are a team of veteran commandos useful in a war here on earth?
Look the Black Templars
How can finns be useful?
More like every super heavy tank of ww2. A thousand stug 3s would be more useful than 50 Tiger 2s
>bait
You should take a few months off of Veeky Forums, friend. It's affecting your mental stability and your ability to process human interactions.
They hijack missile bases and nuke us.
Judging from the fact that the Marines were still conquering only critical planets, I would say that the Imperial Army and the Mechanicum did more Crusadin' than the Legions. The Marines tended to roll around in big balls with the Primarch so they could recruit quickly and were used as problemsolvers, IIRC. Someone wrote a silly little thing about it I found.
"Ayyy Sanguinius, Uncle Mal here. Just checking in on some numbers, how many of your dudes are rolling with you right now?"
"Like 80,000 my man."
"In one fleet?! Wow, you're blowing my mind here, Gwinny. Where's the other 20K?"
"Well there's 50 on Baal, maybe another 50 dudes on honour postings here and there, the other 19,900 are split up over the 4,500 fleets."
"Gwin...that'd be like 4 and a half guys for each fleet."
"Mal, we took 250 fleets each"
"Oh right, gimme a sec...so you sent...79 guys to each of your fleets? 79?! That your lucky number or something?"
"Nah, I sent out 100-strong companies to keep the numbers straight and then we just ran out of Blood Angels, so the last expeditionary fleets under my purview don't have any marines in at all!"
"You absolute madman, Sanguinius. Are all your brothers doing this shit?"
"Bro, half of them don't even gaf about the fleets and are rolling balls deep"
"Then whose marines are spearheading the crusade?!"
"Perturabo, we make him do everything."
"Who?"
Personally I really enjoy the massive, overhyped nature of the Marines and Custodes (especially the latter, since even in the books it's acknowledged that they don't really tank an artillery shell or psychic lance any better than anyone else) just because I adore blasting their armies to bits with my big pack of Literally Who Admech. I lose, whatever, that was 100 dudes and some tanks, we have a Forge World that rebuilds that in literally minutes. They lose, the Marines take centuries to recover, or if I killed someone important like Guilliman perhaps never.
My headcannon is that the number of SM isn't even close to 1 million due to loses etc. I always imagine it being closer to 800k, 900k tops.
If there are only 400 Navy SEALs how are they at all a relevant part of the US military?
BT think the Codex Astartes is poop, they don't pay any attention to its 'limitations'.
>fuck your spiritual liege
Templars just don't give a shit about the codex, they aren't exploiting any loop holes
Also
>inb4 some uninformed autist claims the BT only have 1000 marines
Because along side the quadrillions of imperial guardsmen, they are a brilliant spearhead force.
The same way the red army in ww2 fielded 50,000 odd tanks and over 20,000,000 men, yes 400 infantry could easily defeat a lone tank, but the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.
>"Then whose marines are spearheading the crusade?!"
>"Perturabo, we make him do everything."
>"Who?
Poor Pert.
Where in BT lore does it say what they're doing is kosher? Why aren't other crusading chapters beyond the 1000 marine limit? Why isn't it being noted anywhere that going on a crusade lets you wipe your ass with the codex?
Not saying he has a source or anything, but saying "lets you wipe your ass with the codex" is a pretty massive exaggeration.
Like, take a deep breath, dude.
I'm positively sure that the reason the black templars got away with it was indeed partly because of a loophole ; chapters could in theory exceed 1000 marines if they were on a crusade, weren't considered fleet-based and had no fixed "Home/fortress" under some conditions, which meant that as long as they were in "danger of extinction", they could recruit constantly in order to keep their numbers high enough
The black templars, wiping their asses with the codex as always, decided to exploit the fuck out of it, and to put bolter shells into the head of any inquisitor retarded enough to try to update or change their status, which ended up working pretty well
Space ships have very limited capacities, the name of the game is packing then with the most potent payload.
I had this cool idea a while back of doing a map based campaign, where an orbital map of a war campaign is divided into sectors, and players play on it to win the campaign.
Basically, two or more players form fluffy alliances on either side. Lets say it's a siege of a huge city. First, the defending side faces the attackers in an outskirts area - like a desert or swamp based area. If the defenders win, then they move into a suburban area. This would go on until the capital is taken, for example.
It could add a whole strategic layer, where maybe certain sectors are weak because they have less cover or more cover, or are better suited to vehicles.
Would make a really interesting kind of tournament.